Month: April 2014

In this post from Wintery Knight, cold-case homicide detective and Christian apologist Jim Wallace distinguishes training (as boxers do) from teaching (as in a classroom setting, but where no tests will ever be given). He’s saying that the reason so many young people leave the faith when they go away to college is that the church merely taught them instead of training them for the battles they would face on campus.

This series of 12 videos recounts the 16th-century Protestant Reformation from the 21st Century Reformed Presbyterian point of view. Each episode lasts about 20 minutes. It was produced by Westminster Theological Seminary of Philadelphia (in conjunction with a group called “Upholding the Truth”) and therefore reflects that perspective throughout, including an emphasis on the connection between the Reformation and the principles of those who founded the American nation. The primary on-camera presence is Peter Lillback, president of the seminary.

I cannot recommend the series enthusiastically because it seems weak in several ways. However, for those who possess little knowledge of the Reformation, it could be a helpful introduction. I also enjoyed as a review of important figures and ideas from the period.

I consider Chapter 10 about the martyrs the most important segment of the series. In 21st-century America we have so little conception of the persecution that has afflicted believers through the ages. We need to appreciate the martyrs more. They paid a precious price that we might know the truth.

Michael Patton of Parchment and Pen (a blog) wrote “Christianity, the World’s Most Falsifiable Religion.” (He means this description, by the way, as a compliment.) Here’s how he begins the post:

…[T]he more I research, the more I find it to be the case that Christianity is the only viable worldview that is historically defensible. The central claims of the Bible demand historic inquiry, as they are based on public events that can be historically verified. In contrast, the central claims of all other religions cannot be historically tested and, therefore, are beyond falsifiability or inquiry. They just have to be believed with blind faith.

One of today’s urban myths is that antiquity is filled with myths of dying and rising gods of which Christianity was just a copy-cat formulation. In less than two minutes, Christian philosopher William Lane Craig sets the record straight.

Robert Louis Wilken, emeritus professor of history at the University of Virginia:

At the end of the first century there were fewer than ten thousand Christians in the Roman Empire. The population at the time numbered some sixty million, which meant that Christians made up one hundredth of one percent or 0.0017 percent according to the figures of a contemporary sociologist.

Of course, such numbers are estimates and must be taken with a grain of salt. That said, they do bring Jesus’ words from Luke 12:32 to mind and remind us as well of the time of Gideon when God said to decrease – rather than increase – the number of warriors to be deployed for battle (see Judges 7, where God reduced Gideon’s army from 32,000 to 300). As God said through Jonathan, “The Lord is not restrained to save by many or by few” (1 Samuel 14:6).